Culture matters: comments on Chan’s and Flemmen et al.’s contributions to the field of cultural participation

Key takeaways

content: "@hanquinetCultureMattersComments2019" -file:@hanquinetCultureMattersComments2019

Reading notes

Imported on 2024-06-10 13:10

⭐ Important

• & Especially their 2007 article in Poetics sparked an interesting debate about which data, measurements and methods to use in order to test the homology thesis but also about how to assess highbrow/lowbrow participation and omnivorousness (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007a; Peterson 2007; Wuggenig 2007). (p. 898)
• & These eight items are hard to interpret. In many ways, and maybe with the exception of ‘Carnival or culturally specific festival’, they all are potentially highbrow. The item ‘Rock, pop and jazz’ can have various implications from one individual to another, whether they concentrate on jazz (classically defined as highbrow now) or pop (Hanquinet 2017; Lahire 2006) (p. 899)
• & New practices, such as video games or preferences for rap and rock, do also play an essential role in the formation of social class in the UK, alongside traditional highbrow culture such as classical music or museum attendance2 (Savage et al. 2013) (p. 899)
• & It would be erroneous to argue that latent class analysis (LCA) does not enable us to observe some relations between variables, as Chan noted himself (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007a), but, similarly, I do not believe it helps us grasp the various values people associated to their preferences in the way MCA does. The reason is simple; these techniques have very different ambitions. While MCA has often been described as ‘exploratory’,3 LCA presupposes predetermined data modelization about links between variables; this reduces the field of possibilities (we search the ‘best’ model). (p. 900)
• & As Savage argued, individualization is not contradictory to cultural differentiation and social distinction (Savage 2000: 104). Similarly, Fridman and Ollivier argued powerfully: ‘Since it is related to a set of socially valorised meanings and that it presupposes access to unevenly distributed cultural, social and economic resources, the appreciation of diversity and of cosmopolitanism lead also, and in an often-unconscious way, to social distinction’ (2004: 112 translated by Hanquinet). (p. 901)